Sold as a rock ’n’ roll ramen bar and duly plastered with portraits of Tokyo rockabillies, this hopping 65-seater in a once-grubby corner of Soho is a favorite among food bloggers and their disciples. The rock playlist runs from the Stones to AC/DC, and it’s always cranked up.

Behind a red awning a five-minute stroll from the posh shopping destination of Bond Street, this smart 75-seat dining room is almost absurdly French, with Ricard on the short apéro list and Carla Bruni’s first album wafting over plush leather banquettes. Never mind the democratic-sounding “brasserie” tag: This is CEO central by day and fashion tribe hangout by night.

You’ll have to join a hyped-up, hungry, high-net-worth line to check out Sandia Chang’s 45-seat champagne bar in bustling Fitzrovia, where the snack menu is 100 percent hot dogs. Despite the unlikelihood of the pairing, this is an ultra-fun spot decorated with cartoon art on the walls. In the back there’s a second restaurant, Kitchen Table, where the cognoscenti gather for tasting menus.

Jammed from the minute it opened on Frith Street (a much-loved Soho strip of bars and restaurants, and home as well to udon purveyor Koya and tapas top dog Barrafina), Ceviche pulls in pop legends, Peruvian expats, and West End worker bees with its pisco-fueled escapist vibe. The 60-seat rear dining room is bright-eyed and optimistic, with psychedelic posters and vintage mirrors; the 20-seat bar is packed from noon until night. Note, too, the old Peruvian radio shows piped into the loo.

The 30-seat Salon is above a British deli in one of Brixton’s newly trendy covered markets. Here, everything is young, from the fresh-faced chef and ingenue staff to the twentysomething regulars. Inside, there’s a bar hewn from reclaimed Douglas fir, stripped walls, and salvaged chairs.

Occupying two handsomely renovated stories on a corner in smart, well-fed Fitzrovia, the 90-seat Newman Street Tavern has the look of a slick gastropub and attracts the neighborhood’s yuppie set, from local media execs (downstairs) to thirtysomething couples (upstairs).

Manned by a wisecracking bunch whose mobbed street-food van earned them a West End site at the end of 2012, Patty & Bun is hidden in an alley just north of Oxford Street, the capital’s hectic east–west shopping drag. It’s tiny, with room for just 30 and nothing to see except chipboard panels and big red ketchup bottles.

This picturesque nineteenth-century eating house in the design/media heartland of Clerkenwell, replete with famously hard pews, has been remade by its new owners and enthusiastic, produce-revering chefs. Now young lawyers and bankers book up the landmark dining room, while wine lovers populate the less crowded bar.

The name is as weird as the scene at this 30-seat faux izakaya (Japanese pub) in the West Village from restaurateur Gabriel Stulman and French-Canadian chef Mehdi Brunet-Benkritly (note the Mr. Miyagi portrait above the bar).

Power players commingle with an after-work bar crowd in a plush setting behind the NoMad Hotel’s lobby, north of the Flatiron District. The vibe is buzzy and energetic—even on weeknights, the bar is three deep. If you want to try one of barman Leo Robitschek’s justifiably celebrated cocktails (like the Fig and Thistle—a blend of Excellia Blanco tequila, Cardamaro, fig preserves, and lemon), attempt to nab a seat in the hotel’s library.

Most restaurateurs do everything they can to find a location in a packed area, full of foot traffic (and potential customers). But when Andy Ricker imported his Thai sensation Pok Pok from Portland, Oregon, to New York, he chose a remote stretch of Brooklyn’s Columbia Street Waterfront District. The mishmash of dining rooms—a small main room, a covered deck, and full outdoor seating when it’s warm, for a total of 65 seats—feels as close to Bangkok as you’ll get in Brooklyn.

Top Chef season one winner Harold Dieterle has managed to turn his TV stardom into a successful career as one of the hottest chefs in New York (a city where diners tend to shun celebrity chefs). His latest outing is a comfortable West Village restaurant with 80 seats that’s always packed with scenesters.

Despite a scruffy tenth-arrondissement locale, this shopfront is a hit thanks to chef Katsuaki Okiyama’s Franco-Japanese food. You might see Hermès ties at noon, but later it’s bobos with stubble and tattoos.

Flora Mikula, who earned a name as the gutsiest female chef in Paris while cooking at Les Olivades on the Left Bank, now runs a funky but sleek auberge with 40-odd seats in a trendy part of the eleventh arrondissement. Sit near the subway-tiled bar for casual eats, or choose the teal-blue dining room and the prix-fixe menu.

restaurant tips from chefs

Occupying a strategic sidewalk-level corner of the gorgeous new Hôtel de Nell, this is the third address of chef Bruno Doucet’s La Régalade, the bistro he purchased from founding chef Yves Camdeborde and brilliantly rebooted in 2004. With a sleek decor that includes picture windows overlooking a quiet, atmospheric corner of the ninth arrondissement, a black-and-white checkerboard floor, and handsome solid-oak chairs, this 46-seat place fills with executive suits of both sexes at noon and an arty international crowd at dinner.

After the success of his cult fave bistro Le Bistrot Paul Bert and its seafood sibling, L’Écailler du Bistrot, Bertrand Auboyneau does modern French bistro cooking as executed by edgy young Montrealer chef Louis-Philippe Riel. With a grocery up front and a variety of different seating options (there are 30 seats in total), his newest address, in the eleventh arrondissement, is packed with a mix of food-loving travelers and Parisians.

Serious food lovers know that, these days, many of the best new restaurants in Paris are in outlying quartiers far from the tourist-heavy areas. So hop on the Métro and head for Ménilmontant, in the twentieth arrondissement, where this very charming 26-seat neighborhood tavern with white walls and bare tables has been attracting intrepid Parisian gourmands since it opened last summer. Here, chefs Simone Tondo, an Italian, and Michael Greenwold, an Anglo-American, serve nouveau French food to a ready-for-Hollywood vision of the contemporary Parisian bohemian set.

New Zealander Drew Harré and Miamian Juan Sanchez are making legions of St-Germain-des-Prés locals and Left Bank–loving foreigners very happy with their latest address, a 60-seat bistro cum brasserie in the sixth arrondissement with exposed stone walls, overhead ventilation ducts, laid-back service, and an eclectic but cosmopolitan menu of small-plate comfort food.

Restaurateur Pierre Jancou originally renovated this little shop with magnificent Belle Époque tile murals of exotic birds into a casual bistrot à vins. Then, last fall, he remade it into a 20-seat restaurant, Vivant Table, and hired the talented young Japanese chef Atsumi Sota to run the tiny kitchen. Now it’s the headliner table in a super-hip corner of the trendy and rapidly gentrifying tenth arrondissement.

Lipstick-red leather furniture and herringbone wood floors set a seductive retro vibe in this 60-seat Bund-side dining room helmed by Mauro Colagreco, the only Argentinian chef with two Michelin stars.

It’s so hard to get one of the 250 seats at Mercato, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s second Shanghai eatery, that the hours have been extended to accommodate the throng. Though housed in the grand 1916 building Three on the Bund, the place has very now decor: exposed steel, reclaimed wood floors, and a pizza oven in the middle.

Chinese-American investment banker turned restaurateur John Liu attracts crowds of his peers—rich, worldly Chinese—to this 30-seat dining room in the central Luwan district furnished with distressed painted-wood tables and chairs and exposed brick. (It’s unrelated to New York’s restaurant of the same name.)

French chef Paul Pairet’s avant-garde one-table, ten-seat restaurant has received so many breathless accolades that it’s hard to believe the place is only a year old. Housed in a warehouse in a secret location on the Bund, the “multisensory” Ultraviolet is part IMAX, part molecular gastronomy.

The only Italian outside Italy to win three Michelin stars (for his first Hong Kong restaurant), Umberto Bombana reels in the bigwigs—with their Italian suits and their fat wallets—at this starched-tablecloth, 80-person dining room in the 1923 Associate Mission Building in the downtown Huangpu district.

This high-ceilinged 300-seat dining room near Xiangyang Park is all dramatic chinoiserie: The color scheme is a red and black lacquer, and birdcage lanterns hang from the rafters. This is the second branch of Xin Dau Ji; the original is a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hong Kong.

Tucked away in a quirky mid-city laneway café hung with birdcages and filled with haunting recordings of lost birdsong, China Lane serves lively, modern Asian cuisine like that of its older siblings, China Doll on Woolloomooloo Wharf and China Beach in Manly. But this 140-seat dining room has a kitschy, clubby, sixties-meets-Shanghai vibe, complete with miniature TV screens in the Pirelli rubber–padded bathrooms.

Gutsy nose-to-tail cooking in the gastronomic heartland of Surry Hills. Popular Irish-born chef Colin Fassnidge—who made a name for himself with his 12‑hour slow-cooked lamb shoulder at Paddington’s highly rated Four in Hand Dining Room—is serving all manner of innards in this stripped-down, low-tech warehouse space with room for 75 at a bar, a kitchen counter, and a few low-slung banquettes.

Having cut his teeth in some of the world’s finest dining rooms—from Rockpool in Sydney to Pharmacy in London—chef Mike McEnearney decided to “get real.” So he set up a 120-seat self-serve breakfast and lunch canteen in an all-Australian design warehouse in the suburb of Rosebery, where he began making ethically sourced dishes that are served on enameled-tin plates.

After setting up three of Melbourne’s best-loved Spanish restaurants, chef Frank Camorra has finally hit Sydney’s Surry Hills. And he’s done it in style, with an always-packed, bodega-like space fitted with a generous wood bar for tapas dining, as well as slide-in black-leather booths and a mix of high and low tables grouped around a busy kitchen (about 90 seats in all).

What was once a heaving basement nightclub in downtown Sydney is now a moodily lit, 240-seat den devoted to dim sum and serious cocktails, with a clubby Shanghai teahouse vibe. A mix of soul and R&B hums away as the dinner crowd shifts from city suits to a younger, slinkier set as the night wears on.

American chef Gregory Llewellyn met Australian Naomi Hart when both were working at the acclaimed Fresco by Scotto, on New York’s East Side. Llewellyn got the girl, and Sydney got itself some darn fine down-home American cooking in a newly emerging dining strip in the city’s Inner West. The rollicking 45-seat shopfront space is filled with bare tables, utilitarian chairs, recycled wood, loud music, and an equally loud young local crowd.

The fine line between wine bars with food and full-fledged restaurants with wine gets blurrier with this cozy 60-seat venture from chef Brent Savage and sommelier Nick Hildebrandt, the team behind the high-flying Bentley Restaurant & Bar. While the 500-strong wine list makes it easy to find a perfect match, it’s clear that the lion’s share of the stylish Potts Point crowd is here for highly seasonal shared plates.

Farm-to-table eating gets quite literal at this charming, woodsy, Nordic-influenced 35-seat dining room in Sydney’s Inner West district. Not only does the restaurant grow much of its own food—in the backyard herb garden (complete with working beehive) and in a vegetable patch in the Southern Highlands—but the chefs bring the small-yet-dazzling dishes to the table themselves.

There’s a lot of wood at this smart new 180-seat Rocks district restaurant just off the foyer of the Four Seasons Hotel—in the floor, the chairs and tabletops, and stacked in piles of apple, spruce, and ironbark waiting to fuel the wood-fired grill and oven. Even the air is redolent with the heady scent of burning birch chips.

This is the kind of easygoing restaurant you wish were in your neighborhood. The vibe is relaxed, the music is loungey, the service is friendly, and the menu is solid. Run by a former New Yorker, David Chiddo, it has room for about 50 and is in the Omotesando shopping district, just down the street from Comme des Garçons.

A boisterous 24-seat restaurant on the first floor of an inconspicuous residential building in the business district of Kamiyacho. Service is excellent and crisp, and there’s a knowledgeable sommelier on staff.

These days, the city’s hottest food district is Arakicho, a maze of narrow streets near the bar-crowded Shinjuku area that are filled with small restaurants of exceptional quality. But even here, the exquisite 12-seat Ohara stands out. The hushed interior is designed with traditional washi paper screens; it feels like a secret about to be discovered.

Join the long line of businessmen and local university students to grab one of the 29 stools at the communal table at this bright and spartan restaurant in Kanda, a district famous for its many used-book stores. Soon you’ll be slurping up udon noodles to a throbbing rock sound track. Around you, the air fills with steam from the large pots of boiling water in the open kitchen.

A higgledy-piggledy assortment of old warehouses alongside a freight railroad gulch, Atlanta’s Westside has become the city’s most exciting dining locus. Its old buildings have great bone structure, including the one that houses this nouveau seafood restaurant. Here, a graceful vaulted ceiling and subway-tile walls and tables for 180 belie the space’s former life as a ham-processing plant.

Once a scruffy Decatur café with cinder block walls, Watershed has been made over as a stylish downtown spot serving zingy Louisiana food to a packed dining room and bar—the spillover from the 180-seater hangs out on a patio overlooking Peachtree Road.

Upper King—the stretch of King Street just north of the well-touristed city center—continues to surprise locals and visitors alike with its proliferation of gems such as this grand two-level, 90-seat seafood restaurant set in a 1927 Bank of America building. A celebration of coastal Carolina mollusks and fish, it arrived in a wash of goodwill: James Beard Award–winning chef/owner Mike Lata runs city favorite FIG.

It’s quite astounding to find such hamachi and char in landlocked Dallas—and in a high-end Preston Road–area strip mall, no less—but here they are, served in a simple white 58-seat dining room and bar filled with glittery Dallas ladies slurping oysters and sipping champagne. It’s helmed by John Tesar, who is known for his food at the city’s Mansion on Turtle Creek.

Don’t let the name mislead you: Oxheart refers to a variety of heirloom tomato, not beef offal, and this 31-seat Warehouse District restaurant is an homage to the hearty enjoyment of fruits and vegetables. It’s also a bit of a show: Ten stools around a U-shaped counter are the front-row seats for watching husband-and-wife chefs Justin Yu and Karen Man (young locals who trained among the culinary elite of Copenhagen) as they hover around a kitchen island with their small and laser-focused team. Expect as seatmates a motley assortment of food stylists with iPhones.

Part locavore, part wannabe anthropologist, chef Chris Shepherd purports to tell “the story of Houston food” at this ambitious 180-seat restaurant in the pedestrian-friendly Midtown district that limits its larder to locally raised meats, Gulf seafood, and seasonal produce. To that end, he has mined the metropolis’s Latino, Indian, Asian, and Southern communities to create a family-style, masala-meets-creole menu that’s as busy and brassy as Houston itself. The space, however, is pretty simple—just a bunch of wooden tables in front of a shiny open kitchen.

A gable-roof bungalow was stripped to its studs and retrofitted with subway tiles and blond-wood tables to create this cool East Memphis restaurant. It has an open kitchen with a brick pizza oven and an outdoor boccie court to keep the overflow crowd engaged. (There’s room for 75 in all.) Owners Andrew Ticer and Michael Hudman have crossbred pork-and-bourbon-focused Southern dude food with small plates and brick-oven pizza for a place that appeals to everyone, from families to the flannel-and-fedora-wearing crowd.

Set in a warren off the courtyard of the Royal Sonesta Hotel, this meandering 160-seat restaurant features a different mood for each room—from the plush parlor with its hand-painted murals and antique teardrop chandelier, to the Market Room with its gleaming exhibition kitchen, to the stained-oak bar with its dim gas lamps and selection of house-infused ratafias. All of which adds up to a level of ambition and polish that the French Quarter hasn’t seen in years.

Rife with loud-and-crowded restaurants, bars, and clubs, the Adams Morgan neighborhood has long appealed to congressional aides and interns. But this smart 80-seat bistro has brought in a much broader swath of Washingtonians, including the Obamas, who have joined the exceptionally diverse clientele in crowding into the coffee-colored leather booths and shouting over the considerable din.

A back-to­-basics Californian 60-seat place from the owners of very-popular Flour & Water. A roof garden yields the vegetables, herbs, fruits, and honey used in the kitchen, and a covered patio is heated for year-round alfresco eating.

The city’s best chefs spend off-hours at this 50-seat storefront by married duo Evan and Sarah Rich. Its farmhouse feel—whitewashed barn-wood walls, scarred-wood tables—belies the four-star service and food.

A pop-up turned into one of the Bay Area’s most expensive eateries—the 18-seat Mission District restaurant serves an 18- to 20-course menu for $298, plus wine pairings for $148. The anti-luxury look—concrete floors, 35-foot unfinished ceilings—appeals to the rich Internet set.

Beer is at the center of this 100-seat Mission District restaurant’s manifesto, where dozens of filament lights hang from the 25-foot trussed-wood ceiling like stars in the sky, and affluent start-up guys come for the $55 four-course menu ($75 with beer pairings).

A restaurant that turned a ghost town into a food destination. In Port Costa—a tiny valley off I-80 that had a brief moment of glory as a wheat-shipping center in the 1800s—the lovingly restored dining room is all Victorian touches and nods to the past: As he presents the pork stew topped with a wedge of lime, a waiter points out that sailors needed citrus to combat scurvy.

Right off Healdsburg’s main square, this place capitalizes on Sonoma’s fine weather with a kitted-out patio—there’s a full bar, a wood-fired oven, a prep kitchen in a wood-framed shed, and a boccie court.